Blog Stats

Standing On the “Brink of Battle” Part II :Building the Battleforce/The Germans

In the last entry, I gave an overview of Bob Faust’s “Brink of Battle” Skirmish rules. In this entry I’ll go through the steps of building two battle forces. In Part III, I’ll send these forces into battle.
As I mentioned earlier, the first thing is to pick a time period. In this case, I’m going with early 20th Century (Period 3). Next is the theme/specific year. Since I’ve always been a fan of Alternate History, I pick “Invasion America: 1905”. This features Imperial Germany invading the US. It was a favorite subject of popular literature back then. The next step is to decide the amount of Supply Points (SP’s) available to both sides.
There are three levels of SP’s depending on how large a game you wish to have. The first, 500 SP’s, will give you a small quick game that could be finished in under an hour. The next level, 750 SP’s, will give a larger game that will take more time while the final level, 1000 SP’s will give a large game that could take up to four hours to finish. For our example, we’ll use 500 points. Another interesting rule is that if you paint and name your figures to go along with the Theme as well as properly base them then you can get an extra 25 SP’s to build with. So now, each side will have 525 SP’s with which to build the battle force.
The Imperial German Force is from the 73rd Infantry Regiment (the Hannoverian Fusiliers). We’ll build them as a Standard Unit. A Standard Unit has 1 x Commander who be built with up to 20% of the available points (105). We can have up to 3 Veterans who will share a maximum of 30% of the SP’s between them (157) and 4 or more Troopers who are built with at least 50% of the SP’s (262). We need to have a minimum of 5 soldiers and can have up to a maximum of 15.
We’ll start by creating the Commander. Since a standard German infantry squad consisted of 8 Pvts led by a Lance Corporal, this is a good character to start with.
LCPL (Obergefreiter) Rupprecht Faust (87 SP’s) Commander
Ratings:Combat : 4/ Command: 6/Constiturion 5
Traits: Command, Tactician, Marksman +1 (Note that the Command trait is free)
Gear: Mauser Gew. 98 (Rifle), Bayonet, Helmet, Rucksack, Tactical Harness, Extra Ammo +3
LCPL Faust is a tough, competent, young NCO. I gave him the Extra Ammo Gear at +3. Since it helps with clearing weapon malfunctions this represents skill in weapons handling as mush as any extra ammo carried.

This Battle Force reflects a professional army. Most of the troops are trained (Combat 3) but probably haven’t seen any real action. Their Morale (Command:4) is good and they’re in very good shape (Constitution: 5)
The total cost of the Battle Force is 513 SP’s which is also its’ valor rating for campaign purposes. Next time, we’ll create the opposition…a detachment of United States Marines. They’ll also be built as a Standard Force but with a different emphasis.
Until then Play Games and Have Fun